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The Death of Cyberspace and the
Rebirth of CALL

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This is the text, more or less, of
a recent talk of mine.It draws on some
of my other recent work, so those of you who are avid readers will notice some
themes and examples from a couple of other recent papers.As with all Papyrus News material, feel free
to pass on to colleagues. Mark Warschauer

------

This is an edited version of a plenary speech given at the “CALL
for the 21st Century” IATEFL and ESADE conference, 2 July 2000,
Barcelona, Spain.

The Death of Cyberspace and the Rebirth of CALLMark
Warschauer

The notion of “cyberspace” suggests that there exists a
virtual, online world that is distinct from our real world.“Cyberspace” is a type of fantasyland, where
we take on cyber-identities and engage in virtual reality.But then, when we leave cyberspace, we come
back to the “real world”.

I would contend, in contrast, that the significance of
online communication lies not in its separation from the real world, but rather
in how it is impacting nearly every single aspect of the real world.Just like there is no such thing as
“speechspace” or “writingspace” or “printspace,” so there is no
cyberspace.The notion of cyberspace is
thus not helpful for understanding the very real impact of online networking on
our lives, and indeed the concept of cyberspace is slowly dying out.

In contrast to the notion of cyberspace, let us consider
the views of two prominent scholars of human communication.Manual Castells (1998) has written that
“Information technology, and the ability to use it and adapt it, is the
critical factor in generating and accessing wealth, power, and knowledge in our
time” (p. 92).And Walter Ong (1982)
observed that “Technologies are not mere exterior aids, but also interior
transformations of consciousness, and never more so than when they affect the
word” (p. 82).Thus, according to these
important views, with which I agree, information technology is transforming our
societies and our lives and even, eventually, our minds, rather than creating
alternate worlds.

How we think about cyberspace has consequences for our
vision of English teaching as well.If
we see cyberspace as an unreal fantasyland, then we will likely choose to send
our students there to engage in some practice activities so they can then come
back to perform in the real world.However, if we reject the notion of a separate cyberspace and fully take
into account the true impact of online communication on real life, then we must
teach our students to read, write, and communicate online as a very important
medium of 21st century life.It is this vision that I will discuss today, as I look at how the field
of computer-assisted language learning must be reborn in our new century.

I will begin by examining 10 upcoming developments of
information and communications technology (ICT) and then examine what impact
these developments will have on the field of English language teaching.

Upcoming Developments in Information & Communications Technology

Technology itself does not determine human behavior, such as how we teach.However, it does create the possibilities
for new forms of behavior and of education.The progress of computer assisted language learning (CALL) to date has
depended on the evolution from the mainframe computer to the personal computer
to the networked, multimedia computer.Before we consider what CALL will look like in the 21st
century, we must first briefly look at how ICT will progress in this century.

A fourth change will be from narrowband to broadband.Cable modem connections currently deliver 10
Megabits per second, shared among many users.The next version of broadband (“broaderband”) is expected to bring up to
40 Megabits per second for each user,
or 26 times the bandwidth of a T1 connection (see discussion at http://www5.compaq.com/rcfoc/20000605.html).

A fifth change will be from expensive to affordable,
certain in the developed countries, but also to an increasing amount of people
in developing countries.In Egypt, for
example both the cost of purchasing a personal computer and the cost of a
monthly Internet account have fallen by nearly one-half in the past two years.

Related to this, a sixth development is that the Internet
will change from being exclusive to being a mass form of communication.By the year 2005, it is predicted that some
700 million non-English speakers will be online, including more than 300
million Chinese (see chart by Global Reach at http://www.glreach.com/globstats/evol.html).

A seventh development will be from text to audiovisual, as
exemplified by the growing popularity of home video production facilitated by
new Apple’s new iMovie software (http://www.apple.com/imovie).

An eighth change will be from English to
multilingual.By 2005, the number of
Web pages in English is expected to drop to 41% of the world’s total (Computer
Economics, 1999).However, an OECD
study suggests that a much higher percentage of the Web pages used for
e-commerce will be in English (as suggested by the large percentage of secure
.com servers which are in English, see discussion in The Default Language,
1999).This will create a situation of
diglossia, with people using their own native languages for local or regional
communication and commerce, but still using English for most international
communication and commerce on the Internet.

A ninth change will be from “non-native” to “native.”I am not referring to language here, but to
comfort in using computers.Children
who grow up with computers and the Internet will communicate on them with
“native-like” fluency, as opposed to our generation that had to make the
transition from print to screen.

A tenth change will be from the lab to the classroom.Computers and other online devices will be
found in every classroom in developed countries, not just in computer
laboratories.At least one school in
California is already using class sets of wireless iMac computers, sitting on
carts and ready to be rolled into any classroom for wireless student Internet
access.

Impact on English Teaching

What then is the expected impact on English teaching of
these developments?Let us examine five
areas: new contexts, new literacies, new genres, new identities, and new
pedagogies.

New Contexts

These developments of ICT are an important factor helping
to change the entire context of English teaching.Largely because of the increased use of English in new globalized
media and commerce, there is a major expansion in the number of second-language
English speakers around the world, and a corresponding shift in the
relationship between native- and non-native speakers of English.According to recent estimates (see Crystal,
1997), there are now some 375 million native speakers of English (i.e., in the
“inner circle” of countries such as the U.S. and England, see Kachru, 1986), an
equal number of second language speakers of English (in Kachru’s “outer circle”
countries, such as India and Nigeria), and some 750 million EFL speakers of
English in countries such as China, Egypt, and Israel.This represents a huge growth in the number
of non-native speakers of English around the world, and a change in the relationship
between native- and non-native speaker. Extrapolating from the work of Graddol
(1999), I would roughly estimate that while, a century ago, there were three
native speakers of English for every proficient non-native speaker of the
language, in a century from now this proportion will be reversed.And indeed, the very distinction between
native-speaker, ESL speaker, and EFL speaker will change when millions of
people throughout the world, including those in traditional “FL” countries, use
English much of the day every day to communicate globally and access
international media.

To provide one example of this, according to a study my
colleagues and I conducted in Egypt (Warschauer, Refaat, & Zohry, 2000),
while Egyptian colloquial Arabic is used in much informal chatting and e-mail
use, nearly all formal communication by e-mail in Egypt--even between one
Egyptian and another--is conducted in English.

Continuing on the question of ICT, e-mail, and changed
context of English use, one U.S. study found that e-mail is now believed to be
the principal form of business communication in certain US industries,
surpassing face-to-face and telephone communication (American Management
Association International, 1998).This
thus necessitates a rethinking of the relationship of computers and the
Internet to English teaching, as I hinted at the beginning of this talk.Just ten years ago, for example, it was very
common for those involved in CALL to say that “A computer’s just a tool; it’s
not an end in itself but a means for learning English.”How often did you hear something like that
at a conference?Yet earlier this year,
an English teacher in Egypt told me this, and this is a real quotation from a
real teacher: “English is not an end in itself; it’s just a tool for being able
to use computers and get information on the Internet.”The juxtaposition of these two ideas says a
lot about how our thoughts about English teaching and the Internet must change.It is no longer just a matter of using
e-mail and the Internet to help teach English, as I wrote in my first book five
years ago, but also of teaching English to help people learn to write e-mail
and use the Internet.

New Literacies

This leads us to another important impact of ICT
developments, which is the significance of new literacies.In the era of print, to read was to attempt
to understand the meaning of an external author.In the online era, to read is to interpret information and create
knowledge from a variety of sources.Online reading and research skills include selecting the right
questions, choosing the right tools, finding information, archiving and saving
information, interpreting information, and using and citing information.It’s the difference between taking a book
home from the library—and assuming that the information in it is reliable
because it has been vetted twice, once by the publisher and then by the
librarian who purchased the book—and conducting research online, where the very
act of reading cannot be done without making critical decisions at every step
of the way, such as whether to scroll down a page or pursue an internal link or
try an external link or to quit the page and conduct a new search. In the past,
we used to discuss “critical literacy” as a special category; in the future virtually
all literacy will necessitate critical judgment.

New Genres

Similar changes are occurring with respect to writing. It
has been suggested that the essay will soon become a marked form, like the
short story, in other words something that we may still study but that few of
us will actually write, to be replaced by multimedia (Faigley, 1997).For examples of the types of student writing
of the future, take a look at some of the educational Web sites being developed
by students in the ThinkQuest competition (http://www.thinkquest.org).

Students must master not only multimedia but also
electronic communication.I will
illustrate the importance of new types of writing by briefly discussing a case
which came up in an earlier research study I conducted (Warschauer, 1999).The study involved an ESL writing course in
an Intensive English Program in Hawai’i.One of the students in the course was a graduate student from China. This
student, who I will call Zhong, had previously conducted some research in China
with co-researchers from Sweden.Agreements had been reached about who would have the rights of
authorship on the data collected.Zhong was thus surprised to learn by e-mail that his Swedish
co-researchers were going to usurp all the data under their own
authorship.Zhong attempted to write
them an e-mail message protesting the situation:

DearSvet:

How about your decision for your mothers treatment.
I am sorry I can not give advice because I do not know what cancer she suffered
from. As I know, tumor hospital of our university is skilled in many types of
cancer while Zhongshan hospital and Changhai hospital are good in primary liver
cancer. Zhongshan hospital has special wards for foreign guests. If you can
tell me and Hengjin in detail, we can supply more information about hospital
and doctors…..

As you can see though, the first
draft of his e-mail message was highly inappropriate and would have failed to
convey his message; indeed, it focused principally on the health of the Swedish
colleague's mother and only discussed the disagreement in a vague manner far
down in the message.Zhong worked with
the teacher of the course intensively, over e-mail, to complete two more drafts
of the e-mail message until it effectively communicated what Zhong wanted to
say, as seen here.

Dear Svet: When I received your email message
of Nov 4, I was very surprised to see that you went ahead with your paper on
maternal health care. As you must be aware after our discussion in Shanghai
last September-October, when we distributed all the topics among us, the topic
of maternal health care was incumbent on me for analysis and publication….In conclusion, I am afraid the only
satisfactory solution I can see is to
publish my paper with me as the first author.

As a result, the problem was
resolved in a satisfactory manner.

Not all students will be performing sophisticated
sociological research with international scholars for publication in scholarly
journals.But many students will need
to carry out some form of collaborative long-distance inquiry and
problem-solving as part of their jobs and community activities.It will be incumbent on us to teach the
writing skills necessary for these kinds of tasks.This includes both the pragmatics of written interaction as well
as the hypermedia authoring and publishing skills needed for effective
presentation of material (see discussion in Shetzer & Warschauer, 2000;
Warschauer, 1999)

New Identities

The increased importance of online communication is also
contributing to new kinds of identity.As an example, let us look at the case of Almon, a Hong Kong immigrant
to the United States discussed by Lam (in press).Though Almon had lived in the US for several years, he performed
poorly in English class in school and had little confidence in his academic
English ability.Yet Almon developed
his own “J-Pop” Web site about a Japanese pop singer, and spent hours a day
e-mailing and chatting other J-Pop fans around the world who were attracted to
his site.Though almost all of the fans
were Chinese or Japanese, this communication, as well as the site itself, was
in English.Through this process, Almon
developed self-confidence in his English communication ability, as part of a
global youth movement that uses English and new media to share ideas.Almon’s experience doesn’t suggest, of
course, that we need to downplay academic literacies, but it does suggest that
students who use new media develop a wide range of literacies and identities,
and we need to take these into account in our English teaching.

New Pedagogies

This really brings me to the heart of my talk, which is
the new pedagogies which all these changes require.The following table illustrates some of the pedagogical changes
that have occurred and are occurring in CALL.

I do not want to suggest that these
stages have occurred sequentially, with one following the other, from “bad CALL”
to “good CALL”.At any one time, any of
these may be combined for different purposes.However, there has been a general trend or development over the years,
with new ideas and uses of computers being introduced in combination with those
previous.

Let me give one example to illustrate the difference
between communicative CALL and integrative CALL.Communicative CALL was based on communicative exercises performed
as a way of practicing English.This
was in line with a cognitive view of language learning: that, through
interaction, learners can develop language as an internal mental system.The content of the interaction is not that
important, nor is the nature of the community, nor, really is the learners’ own
speech or output.What is important is
how the interaction helps provide input to the learner to develop a mental
system.

In contrast, integrative CALL is based on a
socio-cognitive view of language learning. From this viewpoint, learning
language involves apprenticing into new discourse communities.The purpose of interaction is to help
students learn to enter new communities and familiarize themselves with new
genres and discourses.From this point
of view, the content of the interaction and the nature of the community are
extremely important.It is not enough
to engage in communication for communication’s sake.

So, allow me to return to the example.I recently spoke to a teacher who was
feeling frustrated.She kept telling
her students to go onto the Internet once a week to practice English, but they
were wasting their time, chatting in their own language and not really engaging
in English.From my view, this reveals
the limitation of the communicative approach to CALL, that is to view the
Internet as a medium of simple (and perhaps purposeless) communication
practice.I suggested to the teacher
that she might instead want to use the Internet to have her students perform
real-life tasks and solve real-life problems in a community of peers or mentors.Students could conduct an international
research project on an issue they are interested in (see Warschauer, Shetzer,
& Meloni, 2000), or perform a service for their communities such as
creating an English Web site for a local organization (Warschauer & Cook,
1999).In these cases, English communication
would be incidental to the main task.But as they carry out the task they would be learning important new
genres and engaging in new discourses.

This is related to the objective of CALL and, indeed, of
language learning, which evolved originally from accuracy to, later, accuracy
plus fluency.I would suggest that we
must add a new objective, together with the previous two: agency.Agency has been defined as “the satisfying
power to take meaningful action and see the results of our decisions and
choices” (Murray, 1997), and “the power to construct a representation of
reality, a writing of history, and to impose reception of it by others”
(Kramsch, A'Ness, & Lam, in press).Agency is really what makes students so excited about using computers in
the classroom: the computer provides them a powerful means to make their stamp
on the world.Think, for example, of
the difference between authoring a paper (i.e., writing a text for the
teacher), and authoring a multimedia document(i.e., creatively bringing together several media to share with a wide
international audience), and even helping to author the very rules by which
multimedia is created (as people have the chance to do right now in this time
of creative explosion of new forms of online expression.By allowing and helping our students to
carry out all these types of authoring—toward fulfilling a meaningful purpose
for a real audience—we are helping them exercise their agency.The purpose of studying English is thus not
just to “know it” as an internal system, but to be able to use it to have a
real impact on the world.

Conclusion

To summarize how CALL is changing, it is useful to look at
one expression of CALL from the 20th century—from the late 1970s to
be exact.A computer-assisted instructional
manual of that day contained the following limerick as recalled by Patrikis
(1997, p. 171)

Word has come down from the
dean
That by aid of the Computing MachineYoung
Oedipus Rex,Could
have learned about sex,
Without ever touching the queen.

In other words, the advantage of
computer-based instruction is that it is completely removed from “real
life.”You can learn English without
having to get your hands dirty in the real world—and then, of course, you can
then come back to the real world to use it.Note the similarity between this notion and the notion of cyberspace,
whereby what is done with the computer is somehow not real.

In contrast to this, let us look at a more current
expression about the value of computers in instruction, that of Shneiderman
(1997), who said “we must do more than teach students to ‘surf the net,’ we
must also teach them how to make waves” (p. vii).This then provides the opposite view of that expressed in the
limerick above.We will fulfill the
best use of computers in the classroom when we allow and encourage students to
perform the most real tasks possible, to take advantage of the power of modern
information and communication technologies to help try to change the world in
ways that suit students’ own critical values and the interests of humankind.

Actually, this is not a new idea. Freire and Macedo (1987)
had earlier expressed the same perspective.They noted that literacy is not only about “reading the word,” but also
about “reading the world” – and not only about reading the world but also writing it and rewriting it (p. 37). These concepts have been an important part of
critical pedagogy throughout the 20th century.But today, new forms of information and
communication technologies provide a powerful new means of achieving them.

This then expresses nicely how CALL must be “reborn.”Let us view neither the computer nor English
as ends in themselves, but rather let us make them tools that our students can
use to read the world, to write it, and to rewrite it. That is my vision of
CALL for the 21st century.

Acknowledgments

This paper is based in part on two other recent papers:
“Millenialism and Media: Language, Literacy, and Technology in the 21st
Century” (Warschauer, in press-b) and “The Changing Global Economy and the
Future of English Teaching”(Warschauer, in press-a).

The Author

Dr. Mark Warschauer is currently based in Cairo, where he
director of educational technology on a large US-funded project for improving
language teaching in Egypt.He is the
editor of Language Learning &
Technology journal and the author of numerous books and papers on language,
literacy, and technology.

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